The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  More recently, some historians have wished to revise the Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution more thoroughly by even questioning its constitutional significance.13 According to these writers, the revolution itself did not establish a limited monarchy. The political and (what is not to be underestimated) the social power of the monarchy and much of its ideological influence, too, survived the revolution. After all, William III was able to summon and dissolve Parliament, choose his own ministers (in church as well as state), conduct foreign policy (details of which he sometimes concealed from his ministers), declare war and negotiate peace. At the same time, the growing demands of war created a veritable empire of patronage, much of it in the gift of the crown, which could be used to reward the loyalty of the court’s friends in both Houses of Parliament. Further, the monarch retained the power to create peers and thus to exert influence over the House of Lords. By the end of William’s reign, 18 out of 26 incumbent bishops owed their sees to him, while no fewer than 36 of the 112 lay peers owed their peerages to him. When to these are added the household peers, who might normally be expected to support the monarch, well over one-half of the upper chamber might be described as reliable. Insofar as it may have led to the resolution of the key conflicts of religion and taxation, the Glorious Revolution paved the way for a potentially re-strengthened monarchy. Indeed, the court remained the engine of executive government, with Parliament playing a subsidiary role on the political stage.

  On the other hand, in one sense at least, the Glorious Revolution did mark the end of an era, with the overthrow of a Catholic monarch and the elimination of any realistic prospect of a Catholic succession. If it was not a total victory for constitutionalism, then the Glorious Revolution was a total victory for Protestantism. Their fears may have been illusory, but many contemporaries had been terrified for the survival of Protestantism had James been allowed a free hand in England. After all, in 1686 he ordered that in Scotland the penal laws should be relaxed against the Catholics but enforced against the Covenanters! In 1689, in dramatic contrast, the Scottish Constitutional Convention declared that it had the right to dispose of the crown, and proceeded to enact a religious revolution which saw the rejection of episcopacy and the establishment of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. In the same way, if we view the Glorious Revolution as an event in European history rather than as one solely in British history, it appears as a defeat for the prospect of a Catholic, centralized monarchy on the French pattern and a victory for the prospect of a Protestant, decentralized body politic.

  At the same time, it is possible to underestimate the constitutional significance of the Glorious Revolution. Although the Whig historians undoubtedly exaggerated the loss of royal authority in 1688–9, the convention did disturb the rigid order of hereditary succession in handing the throne to William and Mary. It proceeded to redraw the line of succession while excluding Catholics from the throne in future. Furthermore, the revolution did lead, and quite rapidly, to exceptionally important changes in the balance of power in the relationship between king and Parliament: in the capacity of Parliament to meet annually, to be elected triennially and to control government expenditure. Since 1660 there had always existed the threat, at least, of royal absolutism exercised through a managed parliament. After 1689 religious toleration no longer depended on the vagaries of the royal prerogative. In general, a more open civic culture followed the Toleration Act of 1689, just as a more open political culture followed the Triennial Act of 1694 and the abandonment of censorship in 1695. Such vital cultural changes may not have been intended by the men of the convention, but they proved to be impossible to reverse. With all this in mind, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that by 1714 Britain had become a multinational parliamentary monarchy. It is true that the monarchy retained formidable prerogative powers and maintained the ability to initiate executive action. If the authority of the monarchy sometimes appeared to wane on the part of William’s successors, it was to a large extent because Queen Anne and George I failed to exploit its latent power. These powers, however, were subjected in practice to a rapidly growing number of statutes and conventions, all operating within a political framework whose essential reality was the annual meeting of Parliament. These pressures became so powerful that the last discretionary royal power, that of vetoing legislation, was used only sparingly. After 1708 it was not used at all.

  In the end it is the success of the Glorious Revolution that was to be so striking to posterity. The designs of a Catholic king had been frustrated, the succession altered and foreign policy sensationally reversed without civil war in England or social revolution anywhere in Britain. In the future the independence of the gentry and aristocracy in their localities was to be respected, while the tampering with local borough charters of which James had been guilty was not to be repeated. Whigs and Tories, Presbyterians and Anglicans were united in their support of the political and religious settlement of 1688–9. This guaranteed the privileges of an aristocratic social order but safeguarded the security of property more widely. The settlement eventually obtained the endorsement of the middling, mercantile orders. Contemporaries, naturally, had a different perspective on these experiences, one that did not combine its varied elements into a coherent and continuous narrative, a perspective that was blurred by uncertainties and distorted by confusion. Nevertheless, one thing remains beyond dispute. The expansion of the powers of Parliament opened the doors of political debate to a more broadly based political nation than had existed hitherto.

  POLITICS AND PARTIES, 1689–1714

  The Glorious Revolution did not usher in a period of consensus and stability. Indeed, it aroused old enmities and created new tensions. In particular, party divisions between Whigs and Tories continued and even intensified and the exercise of power was far from automatic. There was no guarantee that the political arrangements created by the Glorious Revolution would in practice operate smoothly; the new ‘system’ of government had to be made to work. In particular, the constant demand for taxation, the frequent sittings of Parliament and, after 1694, the regularity of general elections created partisanship and thus uncertainty. If the king’s government were to be respected, if the unprecedented amounts of taxation which he was demanding were to be voted and if armies and navies were to be raised and paid for, then the powers of government would have to be utilized as never before, demanding care, subtlety and negotiating skills. In one respect, at least, William, however, had learnt the lessons of the previous reign. If the powers of government were to be utilized in this manner, it would have to be with the agreement of the parliamentary classes.

  The king’s ability to conduct business depended in large part upon exploiting the potential for support which existed in both Houses of Parliament. In the House of Lords, as we have seen, the king enjoyed a built-in majority and one that was steadily growing. In the lower house much would depend upon the distribution of places and pensions. In spite of the rapid expansion in the size of the military and civil administrations, there was always a surplus of suitors for the places available. Indeed, the former seemed to expand the latter. As Lord Cheyne remarked to Lord Verney in 1700, ‘A place at Court with a seat [in Parliament] there is most people’s aim.’14 By 1702, 132 out of the 513 MPs – just over one-quarter – were placemen. Their influence was greater than this figure suggests because they attended debates more regularly than members of the house as a whole. (The lower house’s average attendance at divisions in William’s reign was only 238 out of 513, or 46 per cent.) The house’s debates and committees, moreover, were dominated by an inner core of some 50–60 MPs, many of whom were placemen. In any case, royal influence over Parliament was not of itself either corrupt or illegitimate. In a mixed system of government it was both inevitable and desirable if the executive were to carry its business through. Both William and Anne resisted the temptation to use patronage to excess. For example, they did not directly attempt to bully and corrupt the electorate in the twenty borou
ghs in which it enjoyed influence, contenting themselves with indicating the type of member they wished to see returned.

  It was King William’s primary motive to promote national unity so that he could prosecute the war against Louis XIV with vigour and energy. This was to be difficult to achieve. ‘Fear of Popery has united; when that is over, we shall divide again,’ warned a Whig member of the convention in 1689. He was right. Almost everyone condemned political partisanship, but many members of the political nation indulged in it. William had been horrified at the strength of party feeling displayed in the convention. He was impatient with the bickering of his subjects and uninterested in their historic vendettas. Rather than become the servant of one party or the other, he preferred to maintain a balance between them in his attempts to manage Parliament. Unfortunately, his dour manner and his impatience with the political arts of concession and compromise weakened his attempts to deal with the political groupings of the day.

  The crucial issues of these years – the limits of religious toleration, the conduct of Britain’s European wars and relationships between the king and Parliament – aroused intense partisanship, aggravated by a noisy press, newly liberated after the ending of the Licensing Act of 1695. Almost all contemporary commentators used the language of party to describe their principles. This they did apologetically because party divisions aroused profound anxieties in a society racked by fearful recollections of the civil wars and the Interregnum of the middle decades of the century. To complicate matters, two kinds of political distinction existed at the time of the Glorious Revolution: that between ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ and that between ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’. The Court–Country axis had first appeared in an organized form during the 1670s, when a standing Country opposition to the supporters of Charles II’s Court could be discerned. A few years later, party conflict between Whigs and Tories had arisen during the storm over Exclusion between 1679 and 1681, when the Tories had supported, and the Whigs had opposed, the succession of Charles’s brother, the future James II, to the throne. Such political divisions had rapidly become part of the political order, but they were widely disliked. Parties generated damaging divisions in the body politic; they created enmities between individuals and, even worse, between families and between localities. They thus threatened the harmony of society and endangered the very stability of the state.

  Politicians were defined as Court or Country depending on their attitude towards the executive. Those who supported the king’s ministers on a particular issue favoured the Court, those who opposed it favoured the Country position. Most Court politicians were those in power or those who wished to join those in power. Most Country politicians were suspicious of the Court and hostile to all governments. They hated the alleged corruption of power, the immorality of the Court, the allegedly shady dealings of politicians and, increasingly, the economic power of the state. The issues on which the Country opposed the Court in the 1690s can be whittled down to three. First, they argued that the government’s growing administrative and financial weight threatened the independence of Parliament. This explains their attempts to saddle William with a Triennial Act and a number of place bills. Second, they believed that innocent taxpayers were being bled dry by speculators and stockjobbers. They hated the Land Tax, not only because it was a tax on their land but also because they believed that land was the legitimate source of wealth, and as the owners of the green acres of England, they enjoyed a permanent, vested interest in the nation’s welfare. Third, they strenuously opposed William’s standing army. At the conclusion of peace in 1697, William’s army of 60,000 was three times larger than James II had ever enjoyed. Before the end of his reign, Country politicians had forced him to reduce it to a little more than 6,000.

  It is tempting to dismiss these Country suspicions of the Court as a bundle of negative prejudices rather than a mature political philosophy. Nevertheless, they have to be taken seriously. The Court–Country axis, however nebulous, constituted the principal division between politicians in William’s reign. Moreover, those who professed Country principles were doing more than simply raising issues of political morality; they were raising matters of real public and popular concern. Such concern, moreover, could lead to positive results. The relative success of the Commission of Accounts in investigating the government’s management of the huge sums of money being spent on the war owed much to the initiative of its Country members and to their conception of the national interest. Thanks to their efforts, backbenchers developed considerable knowledge and expertise in discussing the financing of the war. Furthermore, the very fact of its existence might have acted as a deterrent against malpractice.

  As to Whigs and Tories, they were mainly defined by their stance on three issues: monarchy, religion and foreign policy. After 1689 the parties still differed over the issue of monarchy. The Tories were embarrassed by the disregard of the principle of hereditary succession shown in 1688–9, but their respect for the office and person of the monarch prevented them from plotting against William. Slowly and uncomfortably, they allowed themselves to fall into habits of obedience towards their de facto monarch. At the same time, the Whigs, not wishing to set a bad example to supporters of James II, the Jacobites, began to play down their own earlier advocacy of rights of resistance. The death of the Duke of Gloucester, Princess Anne’s last remaining heir, in 1700 reopened the succession question. The son of James II (the Old Pretender) unquestionably had a superior claim to that of the Electress of Hanover, but the Act of Settlement of 1701 lodged the succession with the Hanoverians. The Tories found this further violation of the principle of divine, hereditary succession a bitter pill, but most of them swallowed it. Some, however, could not, and consoled themselves by drifting into Jacobitism. There, thus, began that identification of Toryism with Jacobitism which was to become a feature of British political life for half a century.

  The two parties differed even more bitterly over religion. The Tories were an Anglican party and consistently opposed the Whig Party’s attempts to promote greater toleration for Protestant Dissenters. The Tories always hated what Richard Baxter termed the ‘healing custom’ of Occasional Conformity,15 and in 1702–4 sought unsuccessfully to outlaw the practice. They failed to do so, but public opinion was behind them. The ability of the Tories to mobilize popular Anglican sentiment was further displayed during the Sacheverell case. In 1709 the Reverend Henry Sacheverell had preached a sermon in which he denounced the Glorious Revolution because it had violated the principle of non-resistance to a legitimate monarch and its advocacy of toleration as leading to Occasional Conformity and the total abandonment of religious principle. The Whig government sought to impeach him, an action that met with popular hostility. About 100,000 copies of the printed version of the sermon were circulated and within a year no fewer than 600 pamphlets, sermons and books had plunged into the controversy. The impeachment proceedings against Sacheverell at Westminster were accompanied by scenes of horrifying disorder in the capital as religious passions ran to extremes. Although he was found guilty, his sentence – a three-year ban on preaching – was extremely light. Anything more severe, however, might have stoked still higher the flames of religious extremism. Such episodes found Whigs at odds with Tories, renewing and redefining the basic grounds of conflict between them.

  Political and religious differences between the parties came together on questions of foreign policy. The Tories were unhappy with the massive civil and military establishment which fought the continental wars of King William and Queen Anne. They preferred the cheaper alternative of naval attacks on France’s colonies to the Whigs’ preference for long land campaigns designed to safeguard the Low Countries from French occupation. The years of apparently endless warfare provided countless opportunities for Whigs and Tories to debate and to differ. After Marlborough’s great victories in the early years of the eighteenth century, the Tories became the party of peace and advocated negotiation with France. Their success at the general electi
ons of 1710 and 1713 signified the overwhelming popularity of the religious and foreign policy principles which they advocated.

  In the unprecedented, and even experimental, political conditions which existed after the Glorious Revolution, William III had to construct ministries from whatever materials were to hand. Between 1689 and 1694 he attempted to establish governments formed from coalitions of Whigs and Tories. His personal inclination was to favour Tories as the most instinctive friends to monarchy, but they proved to be the loudest critics of his plans for a land campaign against France. He had therefore to indulge the Whigs, his most willing allies in 1688 but usually the most outspoken critics of monarchy. It did not take long for the coalition of Whigs and Tories, cemented during the Glorious Revolution, to fall apart. The general election of 1690 was a bitter affair in which the two parties tried to blame each other for the dark deeds of the previous reign. The Tories were more successful than the Whigs in so doing, and the remaining months of 1690 saw the Whig hold on power weakening. The king’s first experiment in two-party government had failed to dilute the partisanship of Whigs and Tories. Between the end of 1690 and March 1693, he proceeded to tilt the balance of the government towards the Tories, much to the disadvantage of the Whigs. This, too, was doomed to disappointment. Perhaps no government could have maintained its reputation amid the military failures and public disquiet of the next few years. In the Parliament of 1690, and particularly after 1692, mounting criticism of the conduct and strategy of the war worked to strengthen the Court–Country axis. Early in 1693 a triennial proposal passed both houses, to be vetoed by William. The king now gradually withdrew the Tories from his ministry in favour of supporters of the Whig Junto.16